Whole heap of trouble For the staff at Greengairs landfill, every day is rubbish.holds her breath and visits 'the dustbin of Europe'

"On landfill shooting is used as a back-up when the weather is bad, but with that method the gulls are back within half an hour. When you fly a falcon it'll be four to six hours before they're back again."

Until Friday morning, when newspapers reported a Harris hawk had deviated from its task deterring seagulls from congregating round a nursing home and attacked a Yorkshire terrier, most people were ignorant that birds of prey are commonly used as bird bouncers. Basically, to a Harris hawk there isn't a great deal of difference between someone's precious pet terrier and a wild rabbit. Thus, even when flying falcons, Hunter prefers to err on the side of caution and flies his birds in open spaces such as this.

Site manager David Napier describes Greengairs landfill as a living being. As Europe's biggest landfill it stretches over 500 acres of land, making it roughly the same size as the Alton Towers theme park. It changes shape, emits water and gas and has to be tended to until the last bit of waste withers and dies and becomes inert. Left to its own devices this humpbacked beast could be both extremely smelly and dangerous.

"You have to take the gas and water off for environmental reasons because they are both pollutants, " explains Napier.

"Methane is a pollutant in its raw form and picks up the waste smells. If you lived in a community 300 yards away the odour would have a huge impact."

The landfill has been operating for 15 years and is a multimillion pound industry. So far one third of the site has been filled with mainly household waste from five local authorities:

West Lothian, East Dunbartonshire, East Renfrewshire, Renfrewshire and South Lanarkshire. Basically anything dropped in a dustbin in these areas of Scotland comes here, some 300,000 tonnes of rubbish a year. Non-hazardous commercial and industrial waste - packaging and waste out of factories and contaminated land sites - is also dumped on the site, approximately 150,000 to 200,000 tonnes annually.

Digesting these figures is a struggle but David Rees, operations manager for the Waste Recycling Group in Scotland, estimates that 120 to 130 lorries trundle on to the site and spew out their loads every single day.

It is shaming. Rees reports a drop-off in tonnage coming to Greengairs landfill in recent years but, according to the latest figures from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, some of the largest councils - namely Glasgow, Aberdeen and Highland - are failing to make major improvements in their recycling rates, putting in jeopardy the Scottish Executive's aim to recycle a quarter of municipal waste by next year.

We continue to generate more and more rubbish.

This area of North Lanarkshire has been dubbed "the dustbin of Europe" and neighbouring communities such as Greengairs and Wattston have suffered.

Once the mineral-rich land that surrounds them has been ripped open to make way for open-site mining - as is still being done - the gaping holes are then plugged with waste from all over Scotland. They call this process restoration.

Friends of the Earth Scotland sums up the situation: "Greengairs is virtually surrounded by noisy, smelly, dirty open sites and landfill sites."

Unsurprisingly, those who reside in the area are calling for more recycling and waste reduction. For now, however, landfill is the reality of a consumer society that by and large doesn't consider or care what happens to its waste as long as it's buried elsewhere. Preferably far, far away.

Napier says: "We are seen as being the problem because we run the landfill but we don't generate the waste - we just deal with it."

So how exactly do we deal with the tonne of rubbish generated by the average Scottish household each year?

We are standing on a grassy mound of what Napier describes as completed landfill. At one time in the not-so-distant past the area below our feet was a huge void lined with clay and plastic, a vast bin waiting to be filled. "A brand new cell looks lovely and then you go and put rubbish in it, " jokes Napier.

This bin carved into the countryside has, however, long since been filled and sealed with a plastic lid. A meter of soil is then piled on top and grass seed sprinkled on that. "Apart from making it look nicer the grass also binds the soil, " says Napier.

"When you take away the roads and infrastructure you should not know it's been a landfill apart from the strange hump in the middle of the countryside. Virtually every landfill in the world has been a quarry and the idea is to restore that back to field."

Straight ahead a new cell is steadily being filled. At any one time five or six lorries tip out their loads while three machines resembling midget mobile oil platforms tirelessly travel back and forth over the waste, spreading it in layers of around six inches with the grill at the front, using their bulk and huge spiked wheels to shred and compress it as they go.

The area is very exposed. A fierce wind whips around you making it difficult to speak and to be heard. Bits and pieces of rubbish rise out of the new cell and make a bid for freedom. A fence immediately behind catches the fugitives; from here you can make out a few carrier bags. If they succeed in freeing themselves there is a second line of defence - a "litter-picker" - a worker whose life is spent chasing after and retrieving rubbish that gets away. Then there is a third: the perimeter fence that skirts the site.

The cell we are looking at will be finished around August next year. By the end of December Napier predicts the grass will have grown and another curve will have been added to the grassy mound. This is not where the story ends. Waste has a life span of around 30 years, and has to be looked after.

"There are two key fundamentals: water and gas, " says Napier. These are dealt with by an on-site treatment plant and power station.

Glenn Robb, treatment plant manager, is responsible for the liquid side of things which involves draining leachate out of the cells. Leachate is a word that tends to be accompanied by a grimace, even when uttered by those who work in the waste industry. "You know the black gunge you find at the bottom of your bin?" asks Rees. "That's leachate." It's unappealing and what's more, it's poisonous.

Robb explains: "The contaminants in leachate are so damaging that if they got into our waterways they could kill fish and plant life."

But once Robb has finished with the leachate it is fit to be released into the Cameron burn, an A1 burn, which in the world of water quality means excellent.

In very basic terms the process goes something like this: the leachate is pulled off the site and put into lagoons containing bacteria that eat up all the "nasties" such as ammonia.

Once this is completed the water moves on to the reed bed.

It acts as both sieve and sponge for the water; filtering off any solids and soaking up any remaining pollutants.

Not all the water is removed from the cells, however. Some must remain so that goodquality methane gas can be produced - this usually starts happening around nine months after a cell has been filled with waste and sealed. The cell will continue to produce usable methane for roughly 15 years.

The methane is then used in the site's power station to turn the engines, which turn the generator, putting a continuous stream of 12 megawatts of electricity out on to the national grid. Rees estimates the station produces enough electricity to power 10,000 households.

Who knew that landfill could be so fascinating? Nevertheless, as much as they might try and control the environmental impact of the site, and as much as the Greengairs landfill has been praised by Friends of the Earth Scotland for improving its practices, landfill still produces greenhouse gases and is not a sustainable way of managing our waste. What's more, in the words of Greengairs resident Ann Coleman: "It still stinks."

Bird's eye view of Scots' waste

The total amount of municipal waste produced in Scotland in 2004-05 was 3.4 million tonnes, 3-per cent more than the previous year.

Of the waste produced in 2004-05, 2.7 million tonnes was disposed of as landfill.

The council with the worst recycling rate in 2004-05 was Midlothian Council. It recycled or composted 4.7-per cent of its waste.

Fife, South Lanarkshire, Stirling and Clackmannanshire recycled more than 25-per cent of their waste.

The average Scottish council managed last year to recycle 17.3-per cent of its waste.